There were several interesting and curious topics brought up throughout this chapter about communication in the workplace. At the very beginning of the chapter the authors talk about how and where we’ve developed a sense of what work is and what the workplace environment is like. I thought the idea of how we develop our understanding of work from communicating with our parents was pretty curious because it’s not something that I had considered before. Despite this, I think this is definitely true for me and how I came to understand the workplace and the idea of working while I was a child.
Another topic discussed in this chapter was the idea of sedimentation, or when repeated every day practices by employees creates a structure for workplace performance in the future. I thought this idea was very interesting in that I had always assumed it was something facilitated by and done by the company itself and its administrators. After thinking about it a bit more however, it makes a lot of sense that this is something done by workers themselves because these are the people on the ground every day, who are experiencing the reality of the workplace environment.
Something else that I also found to be interesting was that the authors mentioned clocks as an example in this chapter as well, similarly to how the author of the last piece did so. They explained how the invention of clocks laid the foundation for what we now call industrial time. Through their creation, clocks gave us a way to measure and track our punctuality and productivity in the workplace. In many ways this has been a helpful invention and makes sense for a number of reasons. However, it has also led to a shift in our mindset and the way in which we value our work and our time spent at work. I found it helpful for the example of the clocks to be used again in another piece, because it definitely strengthened my understanding of the way that this concept was used to illustrate the points of the authors.
